Alan Dershowitz: Debunking the Newest – and Oldest – Jewish Conspiracy
The publication, on the Harvard Kennedy School web site, of a “working paper,” written by a professor and academic dean at the Kennedy School and a prominent professor at the University of Chicago, has ignited a hailstorm of controversy and raised troubling questions. The paper was written by two self-described foreign-policy “realists,” Professor Stephen Walt and Professor John Mearsheimer.3 It asserts that the Israel “Lobby” – a cabal whose “core” is “American Jews” – has a “stranglehold” on mainstream American media, think tanks, academia, and the government.4 The Lobby is led by the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (“AIPAC”), which the authors characterize as a “de facto agent of a foreign government” that places the interests of that government ahead of the interests of the United States.5 Jewish political contributors use Jewish “money” to blackmail government officials, while “Jewish philanthropists” influence and “police” academic programs and shape public opinion.6 Jewish “congressional staffers” exploit their roles and betray the trust of their bosses by“look[ing] at certain issues in terms of their Jewishness,” rather than in terms of their Americanism.7
The authors claim that the Lobby works against the interests of the United States because Israel’s interests are not only different from ours, but antagonistic to them for several reasons, including that: America’s “terrorism problem” is directly attributable to its “alli[ance] with Israel”8; Israel has gotten us to fight wars, such as those against Iraq, which are not in our general interest; and Israel spied on the United States during the Cold War and provided information to our enemy, the Soviet Union.9
The authors also assert that Israel lacks any moral claim to American support, because the “creation of Israel entailed a moral crime against the Palestinian people”10; Israel has continued to commit crimes including “massacres … and rapes by Jews”11; Israel is not a true democracy, because “citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship”12; Israel is a “colonizing” regime,13 on the road to achieving “pariah status” reserved for “apartheid states like South Africa”14; Israel has always refused to grant the “largely innocent” Palestinians “a viable state of their own”15; and “Israel’s conduct is not morally distinguishable from the actions of its opponents.”16
This particular lobby – which the authors ominously capitalize and reference with the definite article (“the Lobby”) – uses the undue influence of Jews in America to get the United States to do the “fighting, dying … and paying” for wars that are not in its own interest, causing American soldiers to die for Israeli interests.17 It was “the Lobby” that, according to Walt and Mearsheimer, drove the United States into the war against Iraq,18 and threatens to drive us into a war against Iran.19 In other words, real Americans are being killed because other Americans, whose primary loyalty is to the Jewish nation, are manipulating America’s political, media, academic and cultural leaders, as well as ordinary American citizens. American Jews who support Israel – even in a critical way – are thus being disloyal to the United States by placing the interests of a foreign state above the interests of their own country.
If these charges sound familiar, it is because, as I will show, they can be found on the websites of extremists of the hard right, like David Duke, and the hard left, like Alexander Cockburn. They appear daily in the Arab and Muslim press. They are contemporary variations on old themes such as those promulgated in the notorious czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in the Nazi and America First literature of the 1930s and early ’40s, 20 and in the propaganda pamphlets of the Soviet Union....
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The authors claim that the Lobby works against the interests of the United States because Israel’s interests are not only different from ours, but antagonistic to them for several reasons, including that: America’s “terrorism problem” is directly attributable to its “alli[ance] with Israel”8; Israel has gotten us to fight wars, such as those against Iraq, which are not in our general interest; and Israel spied on the United States during the Cold War and provided information to our enemy, the Soviet Union.9
The authors also assert that Israel lacks any moral claim to American support, because the “creation of Israel entailed a moral crime against the Palestinian people”10; Israel has continued to commit crimes including “massacres … and rapes by Jews”11; Israel is not a true democracy, because “citizenship is based on the principle of blood kinship”12; Israel is a “colonizing” regime,13 on the road to achieving “pariah status” reserved for “apartheid states like South Africa”14; Israel has always refused to grant the “largely innocent” Palestinians “a viable state of their own”15; and “Israel’s conduct is not morally distinguishable from the actions of its opponents.”16
This particular lobby – which the authors ominously capitalize and reference with the definite article (“the Lobby”) – uses the undue influence of Jews in America to get the United States to do the “fighting, dying … and paying” for wars that are not in its own interest, causing American soldiers to die for Israeli interests.17 It was “the Lobby” that, according to Walt and Mearsheimer, drove the United States into the war against Iraq,18 and threatens to drive us into a war against Iran.19 In other words, real Americans are being killed because other Americans, whose primary loyalty is to the Jewish nation, are manipulating America’s political, media, academic and cultural leaders, as well as ordinary American citizens. American Jews who support Israel – even in a critical way – are thus being disloyal to the United States by placing the interests of a foreign state above the interests of their own country.
If these charges sound familiar, it is because, as I will show, they can be found on the websites of extremists of the hard right, like David Duke, and the hard left, like Alexander Cockburn. They appear daily in the Arab and Muslim press. They are contemporary variations on old themes such as those promulgated in the notorious czarist forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, in the Nazi and America First literature of the 1930s and early ’40s, 20 and in the propaganda pamphlets of the Soviet Union....